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9-8-08

Jim Cochran, an Iowa State University associate professor
of physics and astronomy, will use this computer equipment to help
coordinate American analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider. Photo by
Bob Elbert.

Iowa State scientists, students contribute to world's biggest science
experiment

AMES, Iowa -- The first beam of protons will begin racing around the
world's biggest science experiment on Wednesday, Sept. 10, and Iowa State
University physicists will be part of the research team taking notes.

They'll also be joining physicists around the world in celebrating a
major milestone for the $8 billion, 17-miles-around Large Hadron
Collider,
the most powerful particle accelerator ever built.

The collider will accelerate beams of protons or lead ions to nearly the
speed of light and crash them together. Detectors will collect data about
the paths, energies and identities of the particles that fly from the
collisions. Researchers hope the experiments answer some basic questions
about how the universe works: How do the particles that make up atoms
acquire mass? What is dark matter? What happened to antimatter? What was it
like just after the big bang?

Technicians install the pixel detector within the ATLAS
detector at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
Photo by Claudia Marcelloni, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research.

Iowa State physicists will help answer those questions by working in a
control room at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research near
Geneva, Switzerland, the home of the collider. Iowa State physicists are
also working on the pixel detector, the innermost part of the collider's
ATLAS detector, one of two huge (it's 46 meters long and 25 meters high)
general-purpose detectors at the collider. And Iowa State physicists are
working to coordinate American analysis of data from the ATLAS detector.

The new collider will also provide plenty of data for Iowa State
researchers studying subatomic particles called top quarks. Quarks are the
basic building blocks of protons and neutrons; top quarks are the heaviest
and last of the quarks to be discovered.

"The Large Hadron Collider is going to be a factory for producing top
quarks," said Eli Rosenberg, an Iowa State professor of physics and
astronomy who collaborated on the ATLAS detector project and is currently on
assignment with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Physicists are also hoping the new collider will produce evidence of
something they've never detected before. That's the Higgs boson, a particle
predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The model theorizes
that space is filled with a Higgs field and particles acquire their masses
by interacting with the field.

Detecting the Higgs could answer basic questions about why matter has
mass and how particles acquire mass.

"We have a theory for generating mass that works well," Rosenberg said.
"We think this particle is why things have mass, but it may be more
complicated than that."

The team of Iowa State physicists preparing to look for answers in all
the data produced by the collider includes Jim Cochran, an associate
professor of physics and astronomy who's leading the group that will oversee
American analysis of data from the collider; H. Bert Crawley, a professor of
physics and astronomy; Soeren Prell, an associate professor of physics and
astronomy; and W. Thomas Meyer, an adjunct research professor of physics and
astronomy. Ulysses Grundler, a postdoctoral research associate in physics
and astronomy, plus Andrew Nelson and Nathan Triplett, graduate students in
physics and astronomy, are based at the collider. Graduate students Kyoko
Yamanaka, Alaettin Serhan Mete and Suyog Shrestha will also be involved in
the project.

Iowa State researchers are using more than $500,000 per year from a
larger U.S. Department of Energy grant to support their work with the Large
Hadron Collider.

The Iowa State researchers are among more than 10,000 scientists and
engineers from 500 schools and companies working on the Large Hadron
Collider. Cochran said high energy physics has a long history of building
the huge international collaborations that make it possible to run the
biggest science experiments on earth.

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Quick look

Iowa State University physicists will be part of the international research team looking
on as the first beam of protons races inside the Large Hadron
Collider on Wednesday, Sept. 10. The collider -- the world's biggest science
experiment -- cost $8 billion and is the work of more than 10,000 scientists and
engineers from 500 schools and companies.

Quote

"The Large Hadron Collider is going to be a factory for producing top
quarks."

Eli Rosenberg, an Iowa State professor of physics and astronomy who is on assignment
with the U.S. Department of Energy, referring to Iowa State research
of top quarks